Since 2017 I have released an annual list on this blog that links to all the books Black women academics or academics that write about Black women have published. You can check out 2017 and 2018 if you haven’t yet. This year’s list was built based on tweets I had captured over on @Blackfeminisms that cited these authors. That said, this list is not exhaustive and will require feedback from anyone who reads it. Please feel free to contact me or comment on the post if there is an academic book published in 2019 on Black women or by a Black woman scholar that I may have missed.
In 2019 Black women from a wide range of disciplines wrote books: Theatre studies, science and technology studies, sociology, psychology, public health, and many more. Beyond that, they covered a wide range of topics related to Black women and girls: how they navigate the criminal justice system; how they strategize to raise their children; how they confront inequality while living with HIV/AIDS and many more topics. These scholars also took a Black feminist or womanist lens to unpack and provide solutions for a host of issues that affect broader society. Add these books to your syllabi, cite them in your own research, and encourage your libraries to stock them.
Happy reading in 2020 and beyond!
- Maisha S. Akbar – Preaching the Blues: Black Feminist Performance in Lynching Plays
- Paula C. Austin – Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life
- Bianca J. Baldridge – Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertain Future of Youth Work
- Kabria Baumgartner – In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America
- Ruha Benjamin – Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
- Ruha Benjamin et al. – Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life
- Nishaun T. Battle – Black Girlhood, Punishment, and Resistance: Reimagining Justice for Black Girls in Virginia
- Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill – To Turn the Whole Word Over: Black Women and Internationalism
- Andrea S. Boyles – You Can’t Stop the Revolution: Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America
- Hazel Carby – Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands
- Orly Clerge – The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia
- Ayo A. Coly – Postcolonial Hauntologies: African Women’s Discourses of the Female Body
- Patricia Hill Collins – Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory
- Tressie McMillan Cottom – Thick: And Other Essays
- Dána-Ain Davis – Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth
- Dawn Dow – Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood
- Jennifer Eberhardt – Biased: The New Science of Race and Inequality
- Wanda K.W. Ebright – Dance on the Historically Black College Campus: The Familiar and the Foreign
- Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande – To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe
- Stephanie Y. Evans, Andrea D. Domingue, and Tania D. Mitchell – Black Women and Social Justice Education: Legacies and Lessons
- Eve Ewing – 1919
- Chandra L. Ford et al. – Racism: Science & Tools for the Public Health Professional
- Adom Getachew – Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
- Aria S. Halliday – The Black Girlhood Studies Collection
- Saidiya Hartman – Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
- Minda Harts – The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table
- K. Melchor Quick Hall – Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness
- Ra Malika Imhotep and miyuki baker – The Black Feminist Study Theory Atlas
- Shirley A. Jackson – Routledge International Handbook of Race, Class, and Gender
- Candice M. Jenkins – Black Bourgeois: Class and Sex in the Flesh
- E Patrick Johnson – Honeypot Black Southern Women Who Love Women
- Aisha Johnson-Jones – The African American Struggle for Library Equality: The Untold Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program
- Julia S. Jordan-Zachery and Duchess Harris – : Black Girl Magic beyond the Hashtag: Twenty-First-Century Acts of Self-Definition
- Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel – Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire
- Kara Keeling – Queer Times, Black Futures
- Tiffany Lethabo King – The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
- Naa Oyo A. Kwate – Burgers in Blackface: Anti-Black Restaurants Then and Now
- Gary L. Lemons – Hooked on the Art of Love: bell hooks and My Calling for Soul-Work
- Bettina Love – We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom
- Stacie McCormick – Staging Black Fugitivity
- Tsedale M. Melaku – You Don’t Look Like a Lawyer: Black Women and Systemic Gendered Racism
- Jennifer C. Nash – Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality
- Amaka Okechukwu – To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions
- Chinyere K. Osuji – Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race
- Nichole Phillips – Patriotism Black and White: The Color of American Exceptionalism
- Therí Alyce Pickens – Black Madness :: Mad Blackness
- Ashanté M. Reese – Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C.
- Loretta Ross, Lynn Roberts, Erika Derkas, Whitney Peoples, and Pamela Bridgewater Toure – Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique
- Tina K. Sacks – Invisible Visits: Black Middle-Class Women in the American Healthcare System
- Shennette Garrett-Scott – Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance Before the New Deal
- Savannah Shange – Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, AntiBlackness, + Schooling in San Francisco
- Jennifer Patrice Sims and Chinelo Njaka – Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future
- Karla Slocum – Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West
- Sabrina Strings – Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
- Brandi Thompson Summers – Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City
- Christin Marie Taylor – Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor – Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
- Ebony Elizabeth Thomas – The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games
- Cheryl Thompson – Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture
- Lisa Tomlinson – Una Marson
- Chanequa Walker-Barnes – I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation
- Celeste Watkins-Hayes – Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality
- Traci West – Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence
- Monica M. White – Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement
- Shaunte Brown White and Kandace L. Harris – Representations of Black Womanhood on Television: Being Mara Brock Akil
- Qianna Whitted – EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest
- Rafia Zafar – Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning
Special thanks to Leea Allen, Keisha N. Blain, Wanda Ebright, Rihana Mason and Amaka Okechukwu, and Blanca E. Vega for their suggestions. Thanks also to Candice M. Jenkins, Lynn Roberts, Stacie McCormick, Tsedale M. Melaku, Traci West, Monica M. White, and Qiana Whitted.
The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (Penn Graduate School of Education) — focuses quite a bit on representations of (and by) Black women in popular culture. It came out in 2019, & I was expecting to see it on the list. Very interesting list you’ve got here!
Thank you for your work! I recommend adding Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South by Christin Marie Taylor (Shenandoah University), published by the University Press of Mississippi this year.
Nemata Blyden, African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019)
Thanks for this list. It is a super helpful compilation. I have found the book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe, very powerful and important. It includes quite a bit of reflection on how Black women live and die in the wake.
Also, I think Jenniffer Nash’s Black feminism reimagined, is a super important and provocative contribution to think Black feminism beyond intersectionality. Many thanks again.
In solidarity, Laura